COONTEC MEDIA COVERAGE

COONTEC Establishes High-Performance Simulator Design Center for SoC Design Validation

(From left) COONTEC SoC design-certified engineers Ki-young Lee, Jeong-hwan Lim, Seong-jae Ryu, and CEO Hyukjun Bang

COONTEC announced the establishment of the ‘COONTEC Design Center’ in Pangyo Second Techno Valley, officially certified by Imperas, a global leader in embedded virtual machines and high-performance software simulation.

Through the establishment of the Imperas-certified design center, COONTEC will be able to provide specialized virtual platform design services to customers in Korea and across Asia, helping accelerate software development and hardware validation efficiency.

Virtual platforms offer many advantages over hardware prototypes because they can be designed flexibly. They can also address availability and portability issues that often arise during hardware prototype-based testing. Software models representing the major components of a virtual platform are combined to form a single executable system.

Processors, peripherals, and interfaces must be developed as software models, and the virtual platform must not only execute SoC binaries accurately but also address performance requirements associated with intensive validation workloads.

Architectures for next-generation AI and machine learning typically use heterogeneous SoC designs and multicore processors. In this context, a virtual platform approach using demanding workloads based on real datasets can be used to fine-tune hardware architectures and software algorithms to identify the optimal configuration.

A full system-level design approach is also required to model arrays of deployed nodes as digital twins across various IoT applications. Virtual platform development engineers must work closely with system architects and developers, serve as a bridge between hardware and software teams, and provide comprehensive software testing platforms for hardware validation to establish essential evaluation criteria.

Hyukjun Bang, CEO of COONTEC, said, “With the establishment of the COONTEC Design Center, we can provide not only expert support for virtual platform development projects, but also flexible and comprehensive services such as training, consulting, and engineering tailored to each customer’s needs. In addition, the OVP modeling infrastructure enables customers to manage projects through flexible combinations of internal and external teams using open-source models and virtual platforms.”